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Vladimir Nabokov

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The Defence

April 26, 2016 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, commentary, plot, study resources,  web links

The Defence was Vladimir Nabokov’s third novel. It was written in the French Pyrenees and Berlin during 1929, then first serialized as Zashchita Lubina in the Russian emigre quarterly Sovremennye Zapiski. This was followed by publication as a single volume novel by Slovo in Berlin (1930).

The Defence

Nabokov had composed chess problems and various puzzles (as well as short stories) for the Russian emigre newspaper ‘Rul that his father had established in Berlin in the early 1920s. All of these contributions were composed under the pen name of ‘V. Sirin’ which he adopted to distinguish himself from his father, whose name was also Vladimir Nabokov. The novel was later serialized in The New Yorker and then appeared simultaneously in the UK and the USA in 1964, translated by Michael Scammell in collaboration with the author.


The Defence – critical commentary

Autism?

In a typically tongue-in-cheek, semi-boastful introduction to the novel, Nabokov congratulates himself on the complex structure of the novel and the compositional chess references and allusions he weaves into his narrative:

the chess effects I planted are distinguishable not only in these separate scenes; their concatenation can be found in the basic structure of this attractive novel. Thus toward the end of Chapter Four an unexpected move is made by me in a corner of the board, sixteen years elapse in the course of one paragraph, and Luzhin, suddenly promoted to seedy manhood and transferred to a German resort, is discovered at a garden table

It is certainly true that the moving backwards and forwards in the chronology of events is handled in a masterful fashion, but Nabokov’s more remarkable achievement is the creation of a narrative related largely from the perspective of someone we would now call autistic.

Young Alexandr Ivanovich Luzhin is sullen, withdrawn, and uncommunicative. He fails to recognise social norms and does not respond to the positive efforts and signals of those around him, including his own parents. He isolates himself from his peers at school, and has obsessive compulsive disorders such as stepping on the cracks between paving stones and memorising car number plates in case they will come in useful at a later date .

Later he is unable to distinguish between dream fantasies and reality, he clings to ‘favourite books’ (Jules Verne and Sherlock Holmes) and he rejects replacements because they are ‘the wrong edition’ – that is, they are not visually identical to the volumes he read as a child. In the medical jargon of autism, this is called ‘sameness’ – a pathological clinging to what is already known.

Luzhin is emotionally detached from both his mother and father, feels only a glimmer of interest in his aunt because she shows him the rudiments of chess, and he lives in a parallel universe of abstract metaphors and tapping every tree he passes with his walking stick. These are all classic symptoms of autism, which at the time of the novel’s composition in 1929 was not as widely recognised as a psychological disorder as it is today.

Leo Kanner of the Johns Hopkins Hospital first used autism in its modern sense in English when he introduced the label early infantile autism in a 1943 report of 11 children with striking behavioral similarities. Almost all the characteristics described in Kanner’s first paper on the subject, notably “autistic aloneness” and “insistence on sameness”, are still regarded as typical of the autistic spectrum of disorders. [Wikipedia]

Nabokov’s skill is to create Luzhin’s sense of detachment and failure to understand or empathise with what is going on around him, whilst the same time giving the reader enough information to see both Luzhin’s point of view and that of the other characters.

Names

Nabokov appears to have been making some strange and not always successful experiments regarding the naming of his characters in this novel. His protagonist Luzhin is referred to by his surname (family name) throughout – even by his fiancée and then wife, which would not be at all likely or realistic. Apart from this distancing effect reflecting the character’s emotional isolation from other characters, the device doesn’t seem to be much more than a literary mannerism on Nabokov’s part. This is underlined by the fact that Luzhin’s birth name and patronymic are dramatically revealed in the very last lines of the novel – to no apparent purpose.

Even more strangely, and for no evident dramatic reason, we never learn the name of his fiancée and bride at all. She is referred to as his fiancée and ‘Mrs Luzhin’. Yet on the other hand, Nabokov does name completely inconsequential characters who have no importance in the development of the novel. They are named, only to disappear a few pages later after making their brief appearances.


The Defence – study resources

The Defence The Defence – Penguin Classics- Amazon UK

The Defence The Defence – Penguin Classics – Amazon US

The Defence The Luzhin Defence – DVD of 2000 film – Amazon UK

The Defence The Luzhin Defence – DVD of 2000 film – Amazon US

The Defence Zaschita Luzhina – Russian original version – Amazon UK

The Defence Zaschita Luzhina – Russian original version – Amazon US

The Defense


The Defence – chapter summaries

1   Young Alexandr Ivanovich Luzhin is a shy, sullen, and awkward boy – possibly what would now call autistic. When his parents take him home from summer holiday back to St. Petersburg, he runs away and goes to hide in a wood shed.

2   His father is a writer who hopes that his backward son is specially gifted. But young Luzhin is not happy and is undistinguished at school, where he is bullied by the other boys. He has two favourite books – by Jules Verne and Conan Doyle. He develops an interest in jigsaw puzzles and number games.

3   Luzhin sees a chess set for the first time and immediately wants to play. There is friction between his father and mother regarding relations with her more attractive sister. Luzhin watches a game played at school then starts playing truant to learn the game from his aunt.

4   He learns more about chess from an elderly admirer of his aunt, then he advances to learn chess notation and replays games in his head. He plays against his father and beats him. He stops going to school, loses track of time, and eventually has a breakdown. His parents take him to an Adriatic resort where, after his mother returns to St Petersburg, her sister joins his father.

5   His mother dies. Luzhin tours Russia as a chess prodigy. His father plans to write a novel about a child chess champion. Luzhin goes go on a European tour with his tutor-manager Valentinov, and when the first world war breaks out he refuses to go home. Valentinov acts in a suspicious and unprofessional manner. His father has difficulty writing the novel and dies before it is produced.

6   Luzhin meets a young woman at a German spa where he is playing exhibition matches. Valentinov has kept him on a Spartan regime, and when he is no longer a youthful prodigy, abandons him. Luzhin announces to the woman that she must become his wife. She introduces him to her mother, who thinks Luzhin is an ill-mannered boor.

7   The mother cannot take Luzhin seriously, but she is mildly impressed when he asks for her daughter’s hand in marriage in a gentlemanly manner.

8   In Berlin he meets the woman’s father, who he bamboozles with chess arcana. The mother continues to be hostile and rude. His fiancée is worried about his ‘illness’. He begins to confuse dreams and reality, and he develops spatial dislocation. He engages in a stressful chess tournament against his rival Turati. There is an adjournment, after which he has another nervous breakdown and imagines he is back in his Russian childhood.

9   Luzhin is found unconscious in the street by some drunks and taken to his fiancée’s house. He is placed in a sanatorium and the chess competition is considered ‘unfinished’.

10   His psychiatrist says that he will recover, but that chess is forbidden for the time being. The fiancée’s parents angrily try to forbid the marriage to ‘this penniless crackpot’. Luzhin gradually emerges from his breakdown. He recaptures childhood memories with great difficulty.

11   Luzhin leaves the sanatorium, and preparations are made for the marriage. A flat is rented, he gives up chess, and he begins to behave more normally. After the marriage ceremony he and his new bride return to the flat, where Luzhin immediately falls asleep.

12   He amuses himself in a desultory manner with an office typewriter and a phonograph. At a charity ball he meets someone from his old school who quizzes him about the past in a way that is disturbing.

13   There are further discussions about making a journey abroad. Mrs Luzhin has a lady visitor from the Soviet Union who is mindlessly patriotic about the Stalin regime. Luzhin thinks he has discovered a hidden pattern in the events of his life. He finds a pocket chess set in the lining of his jacket and recreates his game against Turati at exactly the point it was abandoned.

14   Luzhin gradually rejoins the world of chess and believes his life is a contest being played against an invisible opponent. His wife invites Russian emigres to the home, but Luzhin ignores them all and thinks about a plot to beat his unknown opponent. He wants to devise an unbeatable ‘defence’ Valentinov reappears and invites him to appear in a seedy film that involves chess, but Luzhin thinks this is a trap to lure him back into competitions. He decides that the ultimate defence against his antagonist is to ‘leave the game’ – and following the logic of this notion he commits suicide.

The Defence


The Defence – further reading

The Defence The Cambridge Companion to Nabokov Amazon UK

The Defence Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years – Biography: Vol 1

The Defence Vladimir Nabokov: American Years – Biography: Vol 2

The Defence Zembla – the official Nabokov web site

The Defence The Paris Review – Interview with Vladimir Nabokov

The Defence Nabokov’s first English editions – Bob Nelson’s collection

The Defence Vladimir Nabokov at Wikipedia – biographical notes, links

The Defence Vladimir Nabokov at Mantex – tutorials, web links, study materials

The Defence Vladimir Nabokov – Routledge Critical Heritage- Amazon UK

The Defence Nabokov: A Critical Study of the Novels – Cambridge UP- Amazon UK

The Defence Women in Nabokov’s Life and Art – paperback- Amazon UK

The Defence Strong Opinions (Essays) – Penguin Classics paperback- Amazon UK

The Defence Vladimir Nabokov – Writers and their Work- Amazon UK


More on Vladimir Nabokov
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Nabokov’s Complete Short Stories


Filed Under: Vladimir Nabokov Tagged With: Literary studies, The novel, Vladimir Nabokov

The Enchanter

December 23, 2015 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, critical commentary, plot, and study resources

The Enchanter (1939) was one of the last works Vladimir Nabokov wrote in Russian, using his original pen name of V. Sirin. It was composed in Paris, at a time when he had just started to create works in English – the third of his childhood languages (the two others being his native Russian, and French which was the lingua franca of the Russian aristocracy). Following his arrival in America the manuscript appeared to have been lost, but it surfaced again in 1959 and was first published in English translation in 1987, ten years after the author’s death.

The Enchanter

Because of the sensational publication of Lolita in 1955 and the scandal that ensued, The Enchanter was very obviously ripe for its own commercial success, since it dealt with the same subject – the obsession of a middle-aged man for a young girl. Yet strangely, the novella has never generated nearly as much interest with the reading public – even amongst Nabokov specialists.


The Enchanter – critical commentary

Form

Unusually for Nabokov, there is no effort made to locate the events of the story either temporally or geographically. – and none of the characters are given names, although there is a possibility (discussed by his son and translator Dmitri Nabokov in an afterward) that the protagonist’s name at one time might have been Arthur.

In terms of genre, the narrative is too long to be classified as a short story, and too short to be a novel. But the fact that its subject is concentrated so powerfully on one character and his obsession means it might justly be considered a novella.

It has the classical unities of time, place, character, and action to warrant this classification. The story is entirely concerned with the protagonist’s obsession. The other characters, even the woman he marries and the daughter he abducts, are of secondary importance. The events take place in one location, they are orchestrated in once continuous movement, and their outcome culminates in the protagonist’s tragic downfall.

Nabokov and paedophilia

In recent years, careful scrutiny of Nabokov’s work as a whole has revealed that the subject of paedophilia has been a recurring feature of his novels, from earliest to last. Consequently, there has been an embarrassed effort by some critics and editors to downplay and obfuscate the issue of a distinguished writer who had such an apparently unhealthy interest in the seduction of young girls.

For instance, the contents of this slim volume come heavily protected by double ‘explanatory’ prefaces from Nabokov himself and an afterward and running commentary by his son and translator Dmitri Nabokov. Both of these additions to the text seek to deflect attention from the uncomfortable subject of paedophilia towards the genesis and aesthetic details of the work itself.

In an afterward to Lolita (written in 1956) Nabokov claimed that the idea for its main subject had come to him from a newspaper report of a drawing produced by an ape in the Jardin des Plantes. The drawing showed the bars of its cage, the implication being that the poor beast was imprisoned both literally and metaphorically.

The protagonist of Lolita, Humbert Humbert, is a character who produces a written account of his seduction of a young girl who is his step-daughter, and his murder of a rival who also abducts and seduces her. Humbert’s written deposition (the novel) is produced from his prison cell whilst awaiting trial.

This round-about appeal to our sympathy deflects attention from two uncomfortable facts. The first is that Humbert Humbert, is not imprisoned by his obsession for under-age girls: he acts fully conscious of his desires with the free will of an adult.

The second fact is that Nabokov had been writing about older men having sexual encounters with under-age girls ever since his earliest works – such as A Nursery Tale (1926) and <Laughter in the Dark (1932). Moreover, he had already written The Enchanter (1939) which was based on that theme, and he was still including mention of what we would now class as paedophilia in works as late as Ada or Ardor (1969) and Transparent Things (1972).

Neither The Enchanter nor Lolita are isolated examples of this theme: they are merely the most explicit and fully developed examples of a topic to which Nabokov returned again and again in his work.

The Enchanter and Lolita

There is no escaping the fact that the plots of Lolita and The Enchanter are virtually identical. A middle-aged man is obsessed by young girls of a certain age – generally around twelve years old. In order to secure access to one such girl, the man marries her widowed mother and then plans to kill her. When the mother unexpectedly dies, he takes the young girl away by car to a hotel where he plans to seduce her.

Lolita herself is a far more fully developed character than the un-named girl in The Enchanter. She is more fully described and dramatised, with a quite witty line in teenage American slang.

But if The Enchanter had been published around the time it was written, Nabokov might well have been accused of self-plagiarism when Lolita appeared. It is Nabokov’s good fortune (or his skilful management of his own literary reputation) that the manuscript of The Enchanter did not emerge until three decades after the work which established his worldwide fame – and after his death in 1977.

Point of view

The whole of The Enchanter is related from the protagonist’s point of view. In fact the tale starts in first person singular narrative mode, documenting his turbulent thoughts as he tries to justify his aberrant cravings to himself:

This cannot be lechery. Coarse carnality is omnivorous; the subtle kind presupposes eventual satiation. So what if I did have five or six normal affairs—how can one compare their insipid randomness with my unique flame?

But after a few pages the narrative switches to a conventional third person mode – which is worth noting for two reasons. The first reason is technical. The story must be delivered by someone other than the protagonist if he is to die at the end of the story. (In the case of Lolita Humbert Humbert’s account of events is written whilst waiting for his trial in jail, where he dies.)

Nabokov, presenting the story in third person narrative mode, expresses the protagonist’s desires in a very sympathetic manner = almost as if they are a burden imposed upon him by forces outside himself.

having, by the age of forty, tormented himself sufficiently with his fruitless self-immolation

The protagonist’s thoughts and actions are dressed up in all the elaborate and metaphorical imagery for which Nabokov is famous, as if he wishes to obscure and intellectualise his protagonist’s desire – almost as if as an author he does not wish to address his subject directly.

The second noteworthy reason is one of persuasion. It is interesting that the articulation of the protagonist’s thoughts in the first few pages and the presentation of his acts in the remainder of the text are recounted in a remarkably similar literary style. And the style is one that regular readers of Nabokov will instantly recognise: it is the witty, elegant, and very sophisticated ‘literary’ prose he uses in most of his other works:

At daybreak he drowsily laid down his book like a dead fish folding its fin, and suddenly began berating himself: why, he demanded, did you succumb to the doldrums of despair, why didn’t you try to get a proper conversation going, and then make friends with the knitter, chocolate woman, governess, or whatever; and he pictured a jovial gentleman (whose internal organs only, for the moment, resembled his own) who could thus gain the opportunity—thanks to that very joviality— to collect you-naughty-little-girl-you onto his lap.

The reader is given every encouragement to identify and sympathise with the protagonist – which creates a moral and aesthetic problem that few people have been able to resolve in Nabokov’s work. His supporters have concentrated on the skill of his literary invention and his glossy poetic style; his detractors have pointed to his apparent lack of concern for the victims of the outrages perpetrated by his protagonists.


The Enchanter – study resources

The Enchanter The Enchanter – Penguin Classics – Amazon UK

The Enchanter The Enchanter – Penguin Classics – Amazon US

The Enchanter The Enchanter: An Adventure in the Land of Nabokov – Amazon UK

The Enchanter The Enchanter: An Adventure in the Land of Nabokov – Amazon US

The Enchanter The Annotated Lolita – notes & explanations – Amazon UK

The Enchanter The Annotated Lolita – notes & explanations – Amazon US

The Enchanter The Cambridge Companion to Nabokov Amazon UK

The Enchanter Zembla – the official Nabokov web site

The Enchanter The Paris Review – Interview with Vladimir Nabokov

The Enchanter First editions in English – Bob Nelson’s collection

The Enchanter Vladimir Nabokov at Wikipedia – biographical notes, links

The Enchanter Vladimir Nabokov at Mantex – tutorials, web links, study materials

The Enchanter


The Enchanter – plot summary

A forty year old man tries to justify his passion for young girls. His fervid thoughts swirl around memories of some earlier instances of attraction in his life.

He sees a pretty young girl roller-skating in a park, then goes back the next day to befriend the old lady who is looking after her. Following this, he arranges to visit the girl’s widowed and invalid mother on the pretext of buying some furniture.

He visits again, and they exchange information about each other – she her medical problems, he his wealth and prosperity. Despite her warnings that she might not have long to live, he eventually proposes to her.

He wants to keep the girl at home, but the mother insists on peace and quiet; she insists that the girl live with friends. On their wedding night he cannot face their nuptials, and walks the streets, planning to poison her. But he gets through the occasion, after which she reverts to being a full time invalid.

In the months that follow, her health deteriorates and she is hospitalised. He receives news that an operation has been successful, and feels outraged and disappointed. But she does die, and he makes preparations to take the girl away.

He plans to escape with her into a world of permanent sexual indulgence shielded from any influences of everyday life. He has rhapsodic visions of a love life between them which will grow with time – so long as she is not distracted by contact with other people.

He collects the girl from her minder and they go off in a chauffeur driven car, staying overnight at a hotel. After some delays with the management, he joins her in bed and explores her body whilst she is asleep.

Overcome by his desire for her, he abandons all his plans of caution and restraint, and begins to molest her. But she wakes up and screams, and this disturbance awakens other people in the hotel. He panics, escapes into the street, where he is run over and killed by a passing truck.

© Roy Johnson 2015


Vladimir Nabokov, The Enchanter, London: Penguin Classics, 2009, pp.96, ISBN: 014119118X


Vladimir Nabokov – web links

The Enchanter Vladimir Nabokov at Mantex
Biographical notes, book reviews, tutorials, study guides, videos, web links, and essays on the Complete Short Stories.

The Enchanter Vladimir Nabokov at Wikipedia
Biographical notes, list of major works, bibliography, and web links

The Enchanter Lolita USA
A ‘geographical scrutiny’ of Humbert and Lolita’s journey across America. Essay and photographic study by Dieter E. Zimmer.

The Enchanter Vladimir Nabokov Writings – First Appearance
An illustrated collection of first editions in English. Photographs with bibliographical notes compiled by Bob Nelson

The Enchanter Vladimir Nabokov at the Internet Movie Database
Adaptations for the cinema and television – in various languages. Full details of directors and actors, plot, box office, trivia, continuity errors, and quiz.

The Enchanter Zembla
Biography, timeline, photographs, eTexts, sound clips, butterflies, literary criticism, online journal, scholarly essays, and an online annotated version of Ada – housed at Pennsylvania State University Library.

The Enchanter Nabokov Museum
A major collection housed in Nabokov’s old family home (now a museum) in St. Petersburg. – biography, photos, family home, videos in English and Russian.


The EnchanterThe Cambridge Companion to Nabokov Vladimir Nabokov held the unique distinction of being one of the most important writers of the twentieth century in two separate languages, Russian and English. This volume offers a concise and informative introduction into the author’s fascinating creative world. Specially commissioned essays by distinguished scholars illuminate numerous facets of the writer’s legacy, from his early contributions as a poet and short-story writer to his dazzling achievements as one of the most original novelists of the twentieth century. Topics receiving fresh coverage include Nabokov’s narrative strategies, the evolution of his world-view, and his relationship to the literary and cultural currents of his day. The volume also contains valuable supplementary material such as a chronology of the writer’s life and a guide to further critical reading.   The Enchanter Buy the book here


More on Vladimir Nabokov
More on literary studies
Nabokov’s Complete Short Stories


Filed Under: Vladimir Nabokov Tagged With: Literary studies, The Novella, Vladimir Nabokov

The Original of Laura

January 8, 2010 by Roy Johnson

a novel in fragments

The Original of Laura (Dying is Fun) is a novel from beyond the grave by Vladimir Nabokov. Everyone has now woken up to the fact that Nabokov has been writing stories and novels about older men and younger women (and even younger girls) for quite some time. It’s no good taking his word for it (as he claims in his preface) that the original inspiration for Lolita came from a ‘painting’ by a chimpanzee in the Jardin des plantes. He had already written an entire novella (The Enchanter 1939) on exactly the same theme of what is now technically classed as paedophilia.

The Original of LauraWe now have his posthumous (and presumably last) work, which has been released even though he made an express wish that it should not be published if it were to be unfinished at the time of his death. And it certainly isn’t finished. Even to call it ‘a novel in fragments’ is stretching definitions somewhat. It consists of the drafts of three discernable and coherent chapters, plus lots of notes for other vaguely related materials which Nabokov was working on at the time of his death in 1977.

The novel-to-be seems to contain two main themes. The first is the sexual life of a flirty young girl called Flora (aged twelve in the semi-completed chapters) who is pursued lecherously by an ageing roué called (believe it or not) Hubert H. Hubert. She survives this and moves with her mother to an American college, where she studies French and Russian. Readers of Nabokov’s other novels will recognise elements from Laughter in the Dark, Lolita, and Pnin already.

Part way through, the index cards on which Nabokov famously composed his novels change from relating a story to notes and instructions to himself – ideas for the plot, memos to invent a plausible name for a pharmaceutical, and lists of unusual words he was obviously striving to coin.

The second theme, which gives the book its sub-title, concerns Dr Philip Wild, a teacher at the college, whom Flora eventually marries. He is overweight, has bad feet, and he embarks on a quest of what he calls ‘dying by auto-dissolution’. It seems quite clear that the connections between these two parts of the narrative had not been conceptualised by Nabokov – which provides an interesting glimpse into his methods as a writer.

There are also hints that his story is the original source material for another book called My Laura written by somebody else that went on to become a best-seller. Here we have further echoes of Lolita, and typical Nabokovian playfulness – but since this theme remains undeveloped it warrants little attention.

This brings us to the book as a physical object and a product of print production. It’s the nearest a reader could get to seeing the system of writing for which Nabokov was famous. The index cards on which he wrote are photographically reproduced at the top of each right-hand page, with the text of the card reproduced below, complete with mis-spellings, grammatical errors, and slips of the pen.

The Original of Laura

The cover of the book is a photo-print of a typical index card, and each of the 138 index cards also has perforated edges, so theoretically they can be removed from the book and arranged in a different order if required. I imagine this gimmick will be dropped when the book is published in paperback, but Nabokovians and bibliophiles will undoubtedly want to possess this novelty edition.

That’s the good part. The not-so-good news is that the book is set in a font (Filosofia, by Zuzana Licko) which is a version of Bodoni. The body text is quite elegant and readable, but some headlines are set in the font’s unicase version, which has capitals and lower case of the same height. I am quite confident that Nabokov would have detested such affectation, and the results on some pages look awful.

The book has been created by Chip Kidd, a respected graphic designer, but I’m afraid this does not add anything to the appeal of this particular book or to Nabokov’s oeuvre as a whole. The index cards come out of this well enough, but reading the text in black print on dark grey paper is no joke.

The story is presented in an interesting and very allusive manner. There are unexplained shifts in the temporal sequence of events and the narrative point of view. These suggest that Nabokov was still experimenting with narrative strategies right up to the end of his life. [I have examined this phenomenon in my study of his short stories.] However, it has to be said that in common with the prose style of his other late works, it is contaminated by lots of irritating quirks and tics, such as his weakness for alliteration – though it might be slightly unfair to judge him from what was obviously a work in progress.

‘foetally folded … narrow nates … He brought from the favourite florist of fashionable girls a banal bevy of bird of paradise flowers’

It has been claimed that Nabokov would envisage a novel complete in his mind before starting to write it. This was supposed to allow him to work on any section his wished, then place a card in the stack already written. The cards in this volume cast severe doubts on that claim. There is some sense of fluency in the semi-completed chapters, but it’s of a kind that characterises his less distinguished novels; and the remainder prove that he was thinking aloud and making it up as he went along.

The volume has a preface written by his son Dmitri which is a pompous and badly-written piece of self-indulgence that tells us very little about the manuscript and why it came to be published. What it does tell us is how not to behave as the offspring of a famous person.

So, it’s a production with a number of interesting features. It’s clearly a piece of gross commercial opportunism; it gives more ammunition to those who see Nabokov as a great writer with a dubious interest in under-age girls; it’s unlikely to enhance his reputation as a writer; but for me it’s a fascinating glimpse into the writer’s workshop – and further proof that we shouldn’t take what writers say about their own motivations and methods at face value.

Buy the book at Amazon UK

Buy the book at Amazon US

© Roy Johnson 2010


Vladimir Nabokov, The Original of Laura: (Dying is Fun) a novel in fragments, London: Penguin, 2009, pp. 278, ISBN 0141191155


More on Vladimir Nabokov
More on literary studies
Nabokov’s Complete Short Stories


Filed Under: Vladimir Nabokov Tagged With: English literature, The novel, The Original of Laura, Vladimir Nabokov

The Real Life of Sebastian Knight

May 12, 2016 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, commentary, study resources, and web links

The Real Life of Sebastian Knight is the first novel that Vladimir Nabokov wrote in English. He began its composition in late 1938 whilst living in Paris, having left his exile in Berlin the year before. Around this time, amidst the diaspora of Russian exiles, he realised that he would probably lose his Russian-speaking audience. He switched to writing in English, which was technically his third language (the second being French, the traditional lingua franca of the Russian aristocracy). The novel was first published by James Laughlin’s newly-founded New Directions press in America in 1941.

The Real Life of Sebastian Knight


The Real Life of Sebastian Knight – commentary

This is one of a number of works in which Nabokov made use – for comic and satirical purpose – of biographical details from his own life. He had already used his Russian background and European exile for the substance of Glory (1932) and The Gift (1937) and he continued to do the same later in his career with the burlesque Pale Fire (1962) and the parodic Look at the Harlequins (1974).

Nabokov inserts all sorts of small details from his own life into the narrative – references to exile from Russia, his interest in butterflies, his personal habits of a cold bath each morning, writing in bed, undergraduate life at Cambridge, and the fact that he had a brother, from whom he was rather distant.

The novel also plays teasingly with the relationship between literature and ‘real life’, it parodies the literary genre of biography at a number of levels, and it is a variant on the theme of ‘the unreliable narrator’ which he had exploited so successfully in his earlier novella The Eye (1930).

The book purports to be a biography of Sebastian Knight, written by his half-brother V. But it is mainly about V’s efforts to gather information – including several passages of quite inconsequential events and detailed accounts of his failure to unearth accurate evidence. Moreover, V’s first person narrative is deliberately self-contradictory. He observes:

As the reader may have noticed, I have tried to put into this book as little of myself as possible.

Quite the opposite is the case. His ‘biography’ is a ragback of personal anecdotes and memoirs from his own childhood, plus scenes he imagines from his half-brother’s life, extracts from Sebastian Knight’s own books, and episodes that have no bearing on Sebastian Knight at all.

As a biography, it omits huge sections of Sebastian Knight’s childhood and youth; it fails to give any account of important figures in his life (such as Clare Bishop and the Russian lover); it misinterprets his artistic achievement; ignores the fact of his boorish behaviour; and ends on a note of grotesque bathos when the narrator offers a gripping account of a journey across France that reveals nothing whatever about the subject of his study.

The narrator rejects other people’s opinions and memories of Sebastian Knight if they do not agree with his own; he burns two packets of private correspondence which would (we assume) have revealed important details of Knight’s relationships with the two important women in his adult life; and he fails to interview people who knew him well.

Running through the whole work is a petulant rant against a rival biographer Mr Goodman, whose publication The Tragedy of Sebastian Knight he excoriates as a worthless sham. We have no way of knowing if this is true or not, because he does not quote from it.

We note in addition that as preparation for the biography, the narrator takes a correspondence course in creative writing. Nabokov is deliberately creating an unreliable and an untalented narrator – which would be an interesting literary strategy if he made any coherent or persuasive use of it. But his intention seems to be only to tease and amuse. This is certainly a novel which paved the way for his overwhelmingly successful use of these tricksy devices in later works such as Lolita and Pale Fire, but The Real Life of Sebastian Knight remains a lightweight rehearsal for these later triumphs.


The Real Life of Sebastian Knight – study resources

The Real Life of Sebastian Knight The Real Life of Sebastian Knight – Penguin Classics – Amazon UK

The Real Life of Sebastian Knight The Real Life of Sebastian Knight – Penguin Classics – Amazon US

The Real Life of Sebastian Knight The Real Life of Sebastian Knight – GradeSaver Notes – Amazon UK

The Real Life of Sebastian Knight The Real Life of Sebastian Knight – GradeSaver Notes – Amazon US

The Real Life of Sebastian Knight The Cambridge Companion to Nabokov Amazon UK

The Real Life of Sebastian Knight Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years – Biography: Vol 1 – Amazon UK

The Real Life of Sebastian Knight Vladimir Nabokov: American Years – Biography: Vol 2 – Amazon UK

The Real Life of Sebastian Knight Zembla – the official Nabokov web site

The Real Life of Sebastian Knight The Paris Review – Interview with Vladimir Nabokov

The Real Life of Sebastian Knight Nabokov’s first English editions – Bob Nelson’s collection

The Real Life of Sebastian Knight Vladimir Nabokov at Wikipedia – biographical notes, links

The Real Life of Sebastian Knight Vladimir Nabokov at Mantex – tutorials, web links, study materials

The Real Life of Sebastian Knight


The Real Life of Sebastian Knight – summaries

1   Following the death of the writer Sebastian Knight, a biography is being written by V, his un-named half-brother. The chapter deals with the two marriages of their father, and his death in a duel fought over the honour of Sebastian’s mother, his first wife.

2   The narrator recalls childhood memories of Knight; he quotes from Knight’s memoirs; and he criticises another biographer for factual inaccuracies. He also visits their old Swiss governess, but finds her memories defective.

3   Sebastian, the narrator, and his mother escape from the revolution into Finland. From there, Sebastian goes to Cambridge, whilst the narrator and his mother go to Paris. The narrator recalls Sebastian’s youthful escapade with a ‘modernist’ poet, and his two visits to Paris as an Anglophile undergraduate.

4   The narrator prepares to write the biography by taking a correspondence course in authorship. After Sebastian’s death the narrator visits his rooms in London and goes through the mundane contents of his desk, uncovering vague evidence of a Russian lover..

5   Sebastian’s life as a student at Cambridge. He feels isolated and becomes introspective. He is poor at games, lives eccentrically, and graduates with a first class degree in English Literature.

6   The narrator visits Mr Goodman, Sebastian’s ‘assistant’ and literary agent. Goodman claims to be a close friend of Sebastian’s and tries to dissuade the narrator from writing his biography – because he has just written one of his own.

7   The narrator criticises Goodman’s biography, The Tragedy of Sebastian Knight, as a rag-bag of feeble anecdotes which he calls The Farce of Mr Goodman. He quotes passages from Sebastian Knight’s autobiographical work Lost Property as evidence of his rich, individualistic inner life.

8   The narrator meets Sebastian with Clare Bishop in Paris, then he appeals to Helen Pratt for information. He makes two attempts to interview Clare Bishop, but is put off by her husband.

9   Sebastian writes and re-writes his first two novels, living with Clare Bishop as typist, then they go on holiday to Germany where a doctor in Berlin diagnoses him with heart disease.

10   The narrator offers enthusiastic accounts of Sebastian’s early two novels. The first is a pathetic jumble of detective story cliches; the second is a ridiculous exploration of all possible causes of a coincidental meeting.

11   Sebastian ignores his own literary success; he behaves boorishly towards Clare and their friend Sheldon; and he insults his half-brother when they meet in Paris.

12   Sebastian leaves Clare and disappears abroad for some time, possibly with a Russian lover. On return he is forced to employ Goodman to look after his chaotic literary affairs. He has his portrait painted by Roy Carswell.

13   The narrator travels to the German hotel where Sebastian stayed, in search of the identity of his Russian lover. The manager refuses to give him any information, but a man he meets on a train agrees to act as a private detective.

14   The man produces four possible names. The first turns out to be a false lead, but it does produce contact with an old friend who reveals that Sebastian was not popular at school.

15   The narrator calls on one Russian contact in Paris, but the woman is not there. Her husband recounts his earlier Bohemian existence with his first wife.

16   At another address the woman is also absent, but her friend Mme Lecerf flirts with V and gives an account of a flighty young woman who might be Sebastian’s former lover.

17   The narrator travels to Mme Lecerf’s house to meet her friend. She continues to flirt, and V finally concludes that she is impersonating her friend, and he leaves.

18   The narrator paraphrases Sebastian Knight’s final work, The Doubtful Asphodel – but does so using poetic images and cod-philosophising about ‘the meaning of Life’.

19   The last months of Sebastian’s life following the disappearance of his Russian lover. The narrator receives a letter from him, saying he is in a sanatorium. He delays the arrangements for departure, then receives a telegram saying the case is hopeless.

20   The narrator gives a vivid and protracted account of his overnight rail journey to Paris, then a taxi ride to the sanatorium. He keeps a bedside vigil whilst Sebastian is sleeping – then discovers it is the wrong patient. His brother died the day before.


Sebastian Knight’s publications

The Prismatic Bezel (1925)

Success (1927)

Lost Property

The Funny Mountain

Albinos in Black

The Doubtful Asphodel (1936)


The Real Life of Sebastian Knight – characters
Sebastian Knight a young Anglo-Russian novelist
V his un-named younger half-brother and biographer
Clare Bishop Sebastian Knight’s lover in London
Helen Pratt Knight’s friend in London
Mr Goodman Knight’s biographer and literary agent
P.G. Sheldon a poet and friend of Sebastian and Clare
Roy Carswell artist who paints Knight’s portrait

The Real Life of Sebastian Knight


Vladimir Nabokov – web links

The Real Life of Sebastian Knight Vladimir Nabokov at Mantex
Biographical notes, book reviews, tutorials, study guides, videos, web links, and essays on the Complete Short Stories.

The Real Life of Sebastian Knight Vladimir Nabokov at Wikipedia
Biographical notes, list of major works, bibliography, and web links

The Real Life of Sebastian Knight Lolita USA
A ‘geographical scrutiny’ of Humbert and Lolita’s journey across America. Essay and photographic study by Dieter E. Zimmer.

The Real Life of Sebastian Knight Vladimir Nabokov Writings – First Appearance
An illustrated collection of first editions in English. Photographs with bibliographical notes compiled by Bob Nelson

The Real Life of Sebastian Knight Vladimir Nabokov at the Internet Movie Database
Adaptations for the cinema and television – in various languages. Full details of directors and actors, plot, box office, trivia, continuity errors, and quiz.

The Real Life of Sebastian Knight Zembla
Biography, timeline, photographs, eTexts, sound clips, butterflies, literary criticism, online journal, scholarly essays, and an online annotated version of Ada – housed at Pennsylvania State University Library.

The Real Life of Sebastian Knight Nabokov Museum
A major collection housed in Nabokov’s old family home (now a museum) in St. Petersburg. – biography, photos, family home, videos in English and Russian.

© Roy Johnson 2016


The Real Life of Sebastian KnightThe Cambridge Companion to Nabokov Vladimir Nabokov held the unique distinction of being one of the most important writers of the twentieth century in two separate languages, Russian and English. This volume offers a concise and informative introduction into the author’s fascinating creative world. Specially commissioned essays by distinguished scholars illuminate numerous facets of the writer’s legacy, from his early contributions as a poet and short-story writer to his dazzling achievements as one of the most original novelists of the twentieth century. Topics receiving fresh coverage include Nabokov’s narrative strategies, the evolution of his world-view, and his relationship to the literary and cultural currents of his day. The volume also contains valuable supplementary material such as a chronology of the writer’s life and a guide to further critical reading.   The Real Life of Sebastian Knight Buy the book here


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Transparent Things

April 26, 2018 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, commentary, study resources web links

Transparent Things (1972) was the penultimate novel Vladimir Nabokov published in his own lifetime. It was superseded only by Look at the Harlequins in 1974 and his posthumous The Original of Laura which was published in 2009. It was his sixteenth novel, and the seventh he had written in English, which was his third language after Russian and French. It is written in a very oblique and mannered style which is typical of works from his late period.

Transparent Things


Transparent Things – critical commentary

The intrusive narrator

Nabokov was very keen on using first person narrators. These characters are often witty (Humbert Humbert) sometimes crazy (Charles Kinbote) and on occasions they deliberately set out to bamboozle the reader (Smurov, in The Eye). In Transparent Things the un-named narrator seems intent on making the sequence and the reader’s understanding of events as difficult as possible.

There is no reason to think of the narrator as other than male. Apart from half-formed philosophic observations on time and physical reality, he is presenting the story largely from Hugh Person’s point of view – but it is often difficult to know where one point of view ends and the other begins. The narrator becomes almost like an actor in his own narrative. He addresses his characters; he speaks to the reader; he invents interlocutors; he speaks on behalf of Hugh Person from time to time; and he even talks to himself, commenting on his own story.

This is intended to be playful and amusing, but his presence becomes over-intrusive without ever taking on the persona of a fully realised character. There is also no explanation offered for his relationship to Hugh Person. We are never told how he knows what Hugh is thinking and feeling . Like many of Nabokov’s other stylistic devices used in his later works, this intrusiveness becomes irritating

Nabokov and sexuality

There is now a well-established argument that Nabokov displayed a very questionable interest in sex with under-age girls throughout his career as a writer. Examples range from his earliest stories such as A Nursery Tale (1926), novels such as Laughter in the Dark (1932), his novella The Enchanter (1939), the famous case of Lolita (1955), through to late works such as Ada or Ardor (1969), Look at the Harlequins (1974), and even beyond to his unfinished The Original of Laura which was published in 2009 after his death.

This is a phenomenon that Martin Amis has described as something of an embarrassment in a writer otherwise so distinguished. But what is not so widely remarked is that at the same time as his interest in paedophilia (which he euphemised by substituting the term nympholepsy) his later works take on a distinct and unpleasant aura of smuttiness half hidden under his lexical virtuosity.

For instance the coquettish Armande has a disagreement with her three male friends that she unnecessarily explains to Hugh Person:

Facing him in the heavenly cable car she gave him a comparatively polite version of what she was to tell him a little later in disgustingly vivid detail. Jacques had demanded her presence at the onanistic sessions he held with the Blake twins at their chalet. Once already he had made Jack show her his implement but she had stamped her foot and made them behave themselves. Jacques had now presented her with an ultimatum – either she join them in their nasty games or he would cease being her lover.

Hugh Person speculates on the sexual relationship between the elderly author R and his stepdaughter Julia Moore – and the first possibilities that occur to him involve paedophilia. These are Hugh Person’s thoughts of course, not Nabokov’s, but the frequency with which the subject recurs throughout his work (and this work in particular) makes them attributable to Nabokov. After all, if this is not a topic in which he is interested, why does he keep on writing about it?

He also caught himself trying to establish … at what age, in what circumstances, the writer had begun to debauch Julia: had it been in her childhood – tickling her in her bath, kissing her wet shoulders, then one day carrying her wrapped in a big towel to his lair, as delectably described in the novel? Or did he flirt with her in her first college year

We have already been told (as has Hugh Person) that Julia ‘had been debauched at thirteen by R.’ The same sort of images and voyeuristic details are written into the chapter where Hugh Person visits Armande’s home and is given a collection of family photograph albums to peruse by her mother:

The visitor constructed a pile of albums to screen the flame of his interest . . . and returned several times to the pictures of little Armande in her bath, pressing a proboscidate rubber toy to her shiny stomach or standing up, dimple-bottomed, to be lathered. Another revelation of impuberal softness (its middle line just distinguishable from the less vertical grass-blade next to it) was afforded by a photo of her in which she sat in the buff on the grass, combing her sun-shot hair and spreading wide, in false perspective, the lovely legs of a giantess.

Literary style

Nabokov is famous as a master of prose style. He is normally inventive, articulate, witty, and at his best produces marvellous images and turns of phrase. He can be serious and very funny at the same time; his construction of complex plots and unusual approaches to narrative are matchless; his range of language is dazzling; and yet towards the end of his creative life, these very strengths seem to become his weaknesses. The most obvious case is Ada or Ardor – his parallel to Finnegans Wake – a book stuffed so full of literary tricks and word games, it becomes unreadable.

Transparent Things is littered with annoying and childish alliteration – ‘as the pictured past and the perceived present possess’. Nabokov chooses provocatively silly (and alliterative) names – ‘Paul Plam’ – ‘Jack, Jake, and Jacques’ – ‘Tom Tam’. And worst of all he indulges his penchant for embarrassing schoolboy smut – ‘there’s many a mile between Condom in Gascogne and Pussy in Savoie’.

There are also too many bravura but irrelevant passages, long sequences of word-play in the (short) novel that are out of all proportion in their lack of significance. For instance, three pages are devoted to the manufacture of wooden pencils, and there is an equally lengthy description of a trick tennis shot that Hugh Person thinks he has invented. Neither of these has anything to do with the rest of the novel.

Quite apart from the issues discussed above, the principal weakness of the novel is that there is nothing holding its parts together – no unifying theme or subject. Hugh’s relationship with his father leads nowhere; the sections of the novel that are set in America are geographically unconvincing; the characters of R and his stepdaughter Julia add very little; Hugh’s somnambulism is a rather creaking plot device that allows Nabokov to create a protagonist who murders his wife; and Hugh’s death in the hotel fire is quite accidental, not in any way linked to what has preceded it in the narrative.


Transparent Things – study resources

Transparent Things – Penguin Classics – Amazon UK

Transparent Things – Penguin Classics – Amazon US

The Cambridge Companion to Nabokov Amazon UK

Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years – Biography: Vol 1 – Amazon UK

Vladimir Nabokov: American Years – Biography: Vol 2 – Amazon UK

Zembla – the official Nabokov web site

The Paris Review – Interview with Vladimir Nabokov

First editions in English – Bob Nelson’s collection

Vladimir Nabokov at Wikipedia – biographical notes, links

Vladimir Nabokov at Mantex – tutorials, study guides

Transparent Things

Transparent Things


Transparent Things – chapter summaries

1   A narrator reflects on the relationship between the past and future, and on the nature of physical objects.

2   Hugh Person arrives at a Swiss hotel eight years after his previous visit.

3   He finds a pencil in his room. The process of manufacturing wooden pencils is described in detail.

4   He recalls an earlier visit to the hotel with his father, whose clumsiness irritates him.

5   He goes out shopping with his father, who dies in the fitting room whilst trying on some trousers.

6   With his father’s money, he treats himself to an expensive meal, hires a prostitute, then endures a sleepless night alone.

7   As a child then as a youth, he has suffered from somnambulism.

8   After leaving university, he works in publishing. He edits a badly written romance, then takes up work with R, who lives in Switzerland.

9   Travelling through Switzerland on a train, he meets Armande, whom he wishes to impress.

10   He meets the novelist R at the hotel to discuss business, but cannot stop thinking about Armande.

11   Hugh previously attended an avant-garde play in New York with Julia Moore, then had sex with her afterwards.

12   He visits Armande’s home, but she is not there. Her mother shows him photo albums featuring pictures of Armande as a nude young girl.

13   The next day he meets Armande and Julia Moore in a village coffee shop.

14   He meets Armande at a rendezvous, but finds her with three men. They all hike up a mountain, whilst Hugh is forced to turn back.

15   He watches Armande skiing, then unsuccessfully tries to make love to her on the way back home.

16   Hugh’s sleeping problems and his trick tennis shot which he rehearses mentally as a soporific. His horrible erotic dreams, plus flashes forward to his marriage and some sort of crime.

17   Hugh is besotted with Armande, but she is not a very satisfactory wife. She has slightly bizarre sexual preferences, and is unfaithful to him.

18   Hugh travels to Switzerland to persuade R to make changes to his latest book – which he refuses to do.

19   In New York Hugh corrects the proofs to R’s novel, which contains references to the seduction of his young stepdaughter.

20   Hugh is being interviewed by the police, because his wife has been strangled. He has a dream of killing a prostitute, and wakes up to find his wife dead on the floor.

21   R writes to his publisher Phil about his preparations for death following an unsuccessful operation.

22   Hugh buys a pair of walking boots and retraces his journey to Armande’s house.

23   He also retraces the mountain climb he made with Armande and her three men friends, but he fails to reach the cable car.

24   Hugh compiles a list of reflections on death whilst he is in various mental hospitals.

25   Eight years after murdering Armande he is visiting the Swiss hotels they stayed in. He claims that he deliberately arranged for solitary confinement whilst in the hospitals.

26   He transfers himself to the very room they shared, and he waits for Armande, but the hotel catches fire and he is killed in the blaze.


Transparent Things – principal characters
Hugh Person a 40 year old American publisher’s editor
Dr Person his father, a private school headmaster
I an un-named outer narrator
Armande Charmar a coquettish Swiss girl, who marries Hugh
Mrs Charmar Armande’s mother
R. a middle-aged writer living in Switzerland
Julia Moore R’s American stepdaughter

© Roy Johnson 2018


Other work by Vladimir Nabokov

Transparent ThingsPale Fire is a very clever artistic joke. It’s a book in two parts – the first a long poem (quite readable) written by an American poet who we are encouraged to think of as someone like Robert Frost. The second half is a series of footnoted commentaries on the text written by his neighbour, friend, and editor. But as we read on the explanation begins to take over the poem itself, we begin to doubt the reliability – and ultimately the sanity – of the editor, and we end up suspended in a nether-world, half way between life and illusion. It’s a brilliantly funny parody of the scholarly ‘method’ – written around the same time that Nabokov was himself writing an extensive commentary to his translation of Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin.
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Transparent ThingsPnin is one of his most popular short novels. It deals with the culture clash and catalogue of misunderstandings which occur when a Russian professor of literature arrives on an American university campus. Like many of Nabokov’s novels, the subject matter mirrors his life – but without ever descending into cheap autobiography. This is a witty and tender account of one form of naivete trying to come to terms with another. This particular novel has always been very popular with the general reading public – probably because it does not contain any of the dark and often gruesome humour that pervades much of Nabokov’s other work.
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Transparent ThingsCollected Stories Nabokov is also a master of the short story form, and like many writers he tried some of his literary experiments there first, before giving them wider reign in his novels. This collection of sixty-five complete stories is drawn from his entire working life. They range from the early meditations on love, loss, and memory, through to the later technical experiments, with unreliable story-tellers and the games of literary hide-and-seek. All of them are characterised by a stunning command of language, rich imagery, and a powerful lyrical inventiveness.
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Vera Mrs Vladimir Nabokov

July 17, 2009 by Roy Johnson

a biography of the ultimate amanuensis

Russian literature is rich in examples of famous writers whose wives have acted as unpaid secretaries and copyists. Leo Tolstoy, Fyodor Dostoyevski, and (I suspect) Alexander Solzhenistyn. But Vera Slonim, who married Vladimir Nabokov, took the tradition to unprecedented extremes. They met as Russian exiles in Berlin in 1923 – both dispossessed of fortunes – and she gave up the rest of her life to acting as Nabokov’s secretary, typist, business manager, translator, research assistant, chauffeur, and even standing in for him as a lecturer. Vera: Mrs Vladimir Nabokov is a biography of the wife, but it tells us a lot about the husband too.

Vera Mrs Vladimir NabokovHis output as a writer was large – but as an author still given to writing in pencil on small index cards, then handing them over to her to copytype on an old portable, it’s inconceivable that he would have produced half as much without her self-sacrifice. And it’s a sacrifice she was very willing to make. She promoted and protected his literary reputation throughout his life – and after his death. She did this at the expense of losing friends and making enemies of family alike.

In fact the portrait Stacy Schiff creates is of a clever, proud, but ultimately rather cold and brittle woman who nursed grudges and ‘spoke her mind’ in a way which seemed to be a cover for rudeness and cruelty. If there’s a weakness in her approach as a biographer it’s that she often takes the evidence she gathered from the Nabokovs themselves at face value. She also assumes that scenes from Nabokov’s novels are accurate transcriptions of not only his own life, but even his wife’s life before they met. Both of these are serious methodological weakness.

However, given the unalloyed marital rapture in which they both claimed to live, I was glad to see that she did not skate over Nabokov’s seriously disturbing love-affair with Irina Guadanini – the one event which threatened the idyllic nature of the relationship. Yet in the course of tracing its dramatic denouement she casually reveals several earlier affairs – none of which she had mentioned at all. This is almost like applying the rules of fiction to the genre of biography, where they do not belong.

The big narrative is one of permanent exile – first from Russia to Berlin (the first centre of exile) then to Paris (the second) and finally to the USA, before the world fame of Lolita allowed them to return to Europe. It was eventually for tax reasons that they settled at the Montreux Palace Hotel. They needed a fixed address from which expenses could be claimed.

Throughout this Odyssey, Vera is depicted as a woman who is aristocratic in spirit (though not in fact) who was prepared to sacrifice herself entirely to the needs of her husband – even to the extent of protecting his social reputation when evidence of his sexual peccadilloes and predilections surfaced when teaching young women at Wellsley College. “He liked young girls. Not just little girls” observed one of his dalliances. Vera ended up sitting in on all his lectures, just to keep an eye on him.

She comes across as a curious mixture of hauteur and self-abasement, a Jewish immigrant who nevertheless supported McCarthy in the 1950’s show trials, and a rabid anti-communist who carried a gun in her handbag.

They were a tight-knit double act, who eventually hid behind each other. She wrote letters in his name and on his behalf. He replied to letters in a similar vein – pretending to be her. They had a joint dairy, and they edited their past to present each other in the best possible light. When discrepancies were brought to light, they simply denied them.

Lolita was the turning point in their lives. Nabokov gave up his teaching job, and they became financially comfortable for the first time in their adult lives. And yet in another sense, nothing changed at all. Vera carried on being his full time personal assistant, translating him to the world, and he carried on writing. When he wasn’t producing new novels, he was translating his back catalogue into English and other languages with the help of his wife and his son.

Nabokov was well known for his magisterial pronouncements and his seeming incapacity for the slightest self-doubt. But anyone who has read his work and pronouncements carefully will know that he was given to misleading his readers and omitting the truth (a characteristic Vera shared). In his introduction to Lolita he claims that the first idea for the novel came to him on seeing the painting of a chimpanzee in the Jardin des plantes – when in fact he had already written an entire novella on exactly the same theme in 1939 – The Enchanter. Once again it seems we should ‘trust the tale, not the teller.’

© Roy Johnson 2002

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Stacy Schiff, Vera: Mrs Vladimir Nabokov, London: Macmillan, 1999, pp.456, ISBN: 0330376748


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Vladimir Nabokov an illustrated life

June 20, 2009 by Roy Johnson

potted biography with charming photos and illustrations

This short biographical study offers an introduction to Nabokov’s amazingly varied yet consistent life, and his unrelenting devotion to creativity. It’s written by an expert, and presented in a very attractive manner with archive photographs on almost every page. Even though he came from a rich and privileged background, Nabokov’s life was one which was beset by the tragic events of the age in which he lived. His childhood was idyllic – well educated, and loved by both parents, he was taken to school in a chauffeur-driven Mercedes-Benz.

Vladimir Nabokov an illustrated lifeWhen he was only seventeen he inherited a mansion, a country estate, and a fortune . Within three years however he had lost it all in the revolution and he was forced to leave Russia, never to return. In the 1920s he painstakingly established a reputation for himself as a Russian novelist, writing in the first city of emigration, Berlin, and making a living by giving tennis lessons and setting chess problems and crossword puzzles for newspapers.

When the Nazis came to power he hung on as long as possible, but was eventually forced to move to the second choice for Russian emigres – Paris. He realised that he had lost forever the audience he had spent almost twenty years cultivating, and he started writing in French, knowing that he must start all over again.

Then, with only days to spare before the Germans occupied France in 1940 he escaped to the USA and began the entire process over again, writing in English and struggling to make a living by teaching literature in a girls’ college.

Once again he succeeded in adapting himself to his surroundings, but he felt unappreciated in a literary sense – until he threw down the gauntlet by publishing Lolita. This book changed his life.

He was able to give up teaching, and interestingly, for all his fondness for America, one of the first things he did was to return to Europe. He booked into the Palace Hotel in Montreux and lived there for the rest of his life.

Jane Grayson’s account of his life is interspersed with accounts of his major works – The Gift, Pale Fire, Laughter in the Dark, his stories, most of his other novels, and his translation of Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin, which caused such a scholarly controversy when it appeared. I was slightly surprised that she skirted round the over-indulgences of Ada, his last major work.

But it is the photographs and illustrations which make this book such a charming experience. The images of old Russian estates which inspired so much of his work are surrounded by sketches from his notebooks, book jacket designs from the first editions of his work, and photographs which you rarely see elsewhere.

© Roy Johnson 2004

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Jane Grayson, Vladimir Nabokov: an illustrated life, New York: Overlook Press, 2004, pp.146, ISBN 1585676098


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Vladimir Nabokov Collected Stories

May 26, 2010 by Roy Johnson

complete shorter works – commentary and annotations

Nabokov began writing shot stories as a young man in early 1920s Berlin, publishing them along with chess problems in Rul’, the emigre Russian newspaper established by his father. He continued to do so in the 1930s whilst establishing his reputation as a novelist, writing under the name Vladimir Sirin. Production slowed down when he emigrated to the USA, and then stopped. in 1950 as his academic work and his international fame as a novelist took up all his time. Nevertheless he published four volumes in all during his own lifetime, totalling fifty stories. Vladimir Nabokov Collected Stories brings all those together in one volume and adds as a bonus thirteen extra tales that Nabokov didn’t think worthy of publishing in book form whilst he was alive. He listed these in a handwritten note as ‘Bottom of the Barrel’.

Vladimir Nabokov Collected StoriesNabokov used the short story as a writer’s laboratory, exploring fictional devices and strategies that he then deployed at greater length in his novels. Not that there is anything unfinished or tentative about the results: Almost all his stories are superbly shaped and polished, and the most successful of them rank amongst the greatest modern short stories.

It’s impossible to prove without seeing the original publications, but one can’t help but suspect that many of the stories were revised and re-polished for their first presentation. The whole Nabokov family was complicit in presenting its only wage earner’s work in the best possible light, and Nabokov used the services of both his wife and son as translators and literary assistants. [The recent publication of VN’s manuscript index cards for The Original of Laura demonstrates that the Olympian master was not above committing simple errors of spelling and grammar.]

Nabokov had an amazing range in the tone and subjects of his stories, even whilst retaining his own unmistakable prose style. The tales vary from lyrical evocations of childhood and prose poems which celebrate the surface textures of everyday life, through to narratives of black comedy and a taste for dramatic irony which treads a fine line between beauty and cruelty.

The Eye (almost a short novel, which strangely enough has not been included) is a masterpiece of narrative complexity and deception in which a first person narrator tries to convince us of his wit and popularity, does just the opposite, then resolves to kill himself half way through the story. How can this be? Nabokov contrives this narrative conundrum as another opportunity to show off his powers of subtlety and manipulation of point of view.

Spring in Fialta (which I think qualifies as a novella) is without doubt Nabokov’s most complex and successful achievement. The story of events is almost inconsequential. A narrator encounters an old lover and recalls his previous meetings with her. His memories of their apparently romantic past are wound together with his account of their latest episode in Fialta.

But the main focus of interest is the narrator’s reliability. He tells us one thing, but the facts as narrated suggest the opposite, even though they come to us from his account. Taken at face value, it’s just a romantic memoir: read more carefully, it’s a roccoco study in self-deception and narrative manipulation which might take several readings to fathom.

Nabokov continued his puzzle-making right to the end. One of his last short stories, The Vane Sisters is a tale in which the solution to a puzzle (a message left behind by someone who has died) is actually woven into the story itself. The narrator is unable to see the message, but provides enough information for the reader to do so. These are stories-cum-puzzles which as Nabokov himself claimed ‘can only be attempted once every thousand years’.

This is an excellent compilation of his whole oeuvre as a writer of short stories. It contains all Nabokov’s notes on the bibliographic history and full details of each story from their first publication, and it has an introductory essay by his son Dmitri which throws extra light on the collection as a whole.

Analysis of Nabokov’s 50+ Stories

Vladimir Nabokov Collected Stories   Buy the book at Amazon UK

Vladimir Nabokov Collected Stories   Buy the book at Amazon US

© Roy Johnson 2010


Vladimir Nabokov, Collected Stories, London: Penguin, 2008, pp.333, ISBN: 0141183454


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Filed Under: Short Stories, The Short Story, Vladimir Nabokov Tagged With: English literature, Literary studies, The Short Story, Vladimir Nabokov, Vladimir Nabokov Collected Stories

Vladimir Nabokov criticism

April 30, 2015 by Roy Johnson

annotated bibliography of criticism and comment

Vladimir Nabokov criticism is a bibliography of critical comment on Nabokov and his works, with details of each publication and a brief description of its contents. The details include active web links to Amazon where you can buy the books, often in a variety of formats – new, used, and as Kindle eBooks. The listings are arranged in alphabetical order of author.

The list includes new books and older publications which may now be considered rare. It also includes print-on-demand or Kindle versions of older texts which are much cheaper than the original. Others (including some new books) are often sold off at rock bottom prices. Whilst compiling these listings I bought a copy of Jayne Grayson’s Vladimir Nabokov – Illustrated life for one pound.

Vladimir Nabokov criticism

Nabokov’s Otherworld – Vladimir E. Alexadrov, Princeton University Press, 2014. This book shows that behind his ironic manipulation of narrative and his puzzle-like treatment of detail there lies an aesthetic rooted in his intuition of a transcendent realm and in his consequent redefinition of ‘nature’ and ‘artifice’ as synonyms.

The Garland Companion to Vladimir Nabokov – Vladimir E. Alexandrov, 2014. Reprint of a 1995 collection of articles and critical essays on Nabokov’s work, plus background reading to his life and suggestions for further reading.

Nabokov’s Dark Cinema – Alfred Appel, Oxford University Press, 1975.

Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years – Brian Boyd, Princeton University Press, 2001. This is the first volume of the definitive biography.

Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years – Brian Boyd, Princeton University Press, 1993. This is the second volume of the definitive biography.

Nabokov’s Pale Fire: The Magic of Artistic Discovery – Brian Boyd, Princeton University Press, 2001. Boyd argues that the book has two narrators, Shade and Charles Kinbote, but reveals that Kinbote had some strange and highly surprising help in writing his sections. In light of this interpretation, Pale Fire now looks distinctly less postmodern – and more interesting than ever.

Stalking Nabokov – Brian Boyd, Columbia University Press, 2013. This collection features essays incorporating material gleaned from Nabokov’s archive as well as new discoveries and formulations.

Nabokov’s ADA: The Place of Consciousness – Brian Boyd, Cybereditions Corporation, 2002. Provides not only the best commentary on Ada, but also a brilliant overview of Nabokov’s metaphysics, and has now been updated with a new preface, four additional chapters and two comprehensive new indexes.

Vladimir Nabokov – Lolita (Readers’ Guides to Essential Criticism) – Christine Clegg, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000. Examines the critical history of Lolita through a broad range of interpretations.

Nabokov’s Early Fiction : Patterns of Self and Other – Julian Connolly, Cambridge University Press, 1992. This book traces the evolution of Vladimir Nabokov’s prose fiction from the mid-1920s to the late 1930s. It focuses on a crucial subject: the relationship between self and other in its various forms (including character to character, character to author, author to reader).

Nabokov and his Fiction: New Perspectives – Julian W. Connolly, Cambridge University Press, 1999. This volume brings together the work of eleven of the world’s foremost Nabokov scholars, offering perspectives on the writer and his fiction. Their essays cover a broad range of topics and approaches, from close readings of major texts, including Speak, Memory and Pale Fire, to penetrating discussions of the significant relationship between Nabokov’s personal beliefs and experiences and his art.

The Cambridge Companion to Nabokov – Julian W. Connolly (ed), Cambridge University Press, 2005. Topics receiving fresh coverage include Nabokov’s narrative strategies, the evolution of his world-view, and his relationship to the literary and cultural currents of his day. The volume also contains valuable supplementary material such as a chronology of the writer’s life and a guide to further critical reading.

Vladimir Nabokov (Writers & Their Work) – Neil Cornwell, Northcote House Publishers, 2008. A study that examines five of Nabokov’s major novels, plus his short stories and critical writings, situating his work against the ever-expanding mass of Nabokov scholarship.

Nabokov’s Eros and the Poetics of Desire – Maurice Couturier, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. A study which argues that Nabokov presented a whole spectrum of sexual behaviours ranging from standard to perverse, either sterile like bestiality, sexual lethargy or sadism, or poetically creative, like homosexuality, nympholeptcy and incest.

Style is Matter: The Moral Art of Vladimir Nabokov – Leyland De la Durantaye, Cornell University Press, 2010. A study focusing on Lolita but also addressing other major works (especially Speak, Memory and Pale Fire), asking whether the work of this writer whom many find cruel contains a moral message and, if so, why that message is so artfully concealed.

Nabokov His Life in Art a Critical Narrative – Andrew Field, Little, Brown & Co, 1967. A combination of biography and exploration of other works by one of the first serious Nabokov scholars – though they later fell into disagreement.

V. N.: Life and Art of Vladimir Nabokov – Andrew Field, TBS The Book Service, 1987. Andrew Field was one of the first major critics and biographers of Nabokov, although they later disagreed about his work and its interpretation.

Vladimir Nabokov: Bergsonian and Russian Formalist Influences in His Novels – Michael Glynn, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. This study seeks to counter the critical orthodoxy that conceives of Vladimir Nabokov as a Symbolist writer concerned with a transcendent reality.

Vladimir Nabokov an illustrated life – Jane Grayson, New York: Overlook, 2004. Short biography and introduction to his work, charmingly illustrated with period photos and sketches.

Freud and Nabokov – Geoffrey Green, University of Nebraska Press, 1988.

Nabokov’s Blues: The Scientific Odyssey of a Literary Genius – Kurt Johnson, McGraw-Hill, 2002. This book, which is part biography, explores the worldwide crisis in biodiversity and the place of butterflies in Nabokov’s fiction.

Vladimir Nabokov and the Art of Play – Thomas Karshan, Oxford University Press, 2011. This study traces the idea of art as play back to German aesthetics, and shows how Nabokov’s aesthetic outlook was formed by various Russian émigré writers who espoused those aesthetics. It then follows Nabokov’s exploration of play as subject and style through his whole oeuvre.

Reading Vladimir Nabokov: ‘Lolita’ – John Lennard, Humanities ebooks, 2012. Provides convenient overviews of Nabokov’s life and of the novel (including both Kubrick’s and Lyne’s film-adaptations), before considering Lolita as pornography, as lepidoptery, as film noir, and as parody.

Keys to the “Gift”: A Guide to Vladimir Nabokov’s Novel – Yuri Leving, Academic Studies Press, 2011. A new systematization of the main available data on Nabokov’s most complex Russian novel. From notes in Nabokov’s private correspondence to scholarly articles accumulated during the seventy years since the novel’s first appearance in print, this work draws from a broad spectrum of existing material in a succinct and coherent way, as well as providing innovative analyses.

Shades of Laura: Vladimir Nabokov’s Last Novel, the Original of Laura – Yuri Leving, McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2014. A collection of essays which investigate the event of publication and reconstitute the book’s critical reception, reproducing a selection of some of the most salient reviews.

Speak, Nabokov – Michael Maar, Verso, 2010. Using the themes that run through Nabokov’s fiction to illuminate the life that produced them, Maar constructs a compelling psychological and philosophical portrait.

Vladimir Nabokov: Poetry and the Lyric Voice – Paul D. Morris, University of Toronto Press, 2011. Offers a comprehensive reading of Nabokov’s Russian and English poetry, until now a neglected facet of his oeuvre. The study re-evaluates Nabokov s poetry and demonstrates that poetry was in fact central to his identity as an author and was the source of his distinctive authorial lyric voice.

Vladimir Nabokov – Norman Page, London: Routledge, 2013. The Critical Heritage is a collection of reviews and essays that trace the history and development of Nabokov’s critical reputation.

Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita: A Casebook – Ellen Pifer, Oxford University Press, 2002. This casebook gathers together an interview with Nabokov as well as nine critical essays. The essays follow a progression focusing first on textual and thematic features and then proceeding to broader issues and cultural implications, including the novel’s relations to other works of literature and art and the movies adapted from it.

The Secret History of Vladimir Nabokov – Andrea Pitzer, Pegasus: Reprint edition, 2014. This book manages to be a number of things all at once – a biography, a primer on revolutionary Russian history, a critical survey of Nabokov’s novels, an act of literary detective work, and a cliffhanger narrative concerning a fateful dinner appointment between literary legends.

Vladimir Nabokov: A Pictorial Biography – Ellendea Proffer (ed), Ardis, 1991.

Vladimir Nabokov: A Tribute – Peter Quennell, Littlehampton Book Services, 1979.

Vladimir Nabokov: A Critical Study of the Novels – David Rampton, Cambridge University Press, 1984. This study assembles evidence from Nabokov’s own critical writings to show that the relationship of art to human life is central to Nabokov’s work. It pursues this argument through a close reading of novels from different stages of Nabokov’s career.

Nabokov in America: On the Road to Lolita – Robert Roper, Bloomsbury USA, 2015. Roper mined fresh sources to bring detail to Nabokov’s American journeys, and he traces their significant influence on his work – on two-lane highways and in late-’40s motels and cafés – to understand Nabokov’s seductive familiarity with the American mundane.

Nabokov at Cornell – Gavriel Shapiro, Cornell University Press, 2001. Contains twenty-five chapters by leading experts on Nabokov, ranging widely from Nabokov’s poetry to his prose, from his original fiction to translation and literary scholarship, from literature to visual art and from the humanities to natural science. The book concludes with a reminiscence of the family’s life in Ithaca by Nabokov’s son, Dmitri.

Nabokov’s Shakespeare – Samuel Shuman, Bloomsbury Academic, 2014. Explores the many and deep ways in which the works of Shakespeare penetrate the novels of Vladimir Nabokov, one of the finest English prose stylists of the twentieth century.

Chasing Lolita: How Popular Culture Corrupted Nabokov’s Little Girl All Over Again – Graham Vickers, Chicago Review Press, 2008. This study establishes who Lolita really was back in 1958, explores her predecessors of all stripes, and examines the multitude of movies, theatrical shows, literary spin-offs, artifacts, fashion, art, photography, and tabloid excesses that have distorted her identity and stolen her name.

Nabokov and the Art of Painting – Gerard de Vries and Donald Barton Johnson, Amsterdam University Press, 2014. Nabokov’s novels refer to over a hundred paintings, and show a brilliance of colours and light and dark are in a permanent dialogue with each other. Following the introduction describing the many associations Nabokov made between the literary and visual arts, several of his novels are discussed in detail.

Vladimir Nabokov (Critical Lives) – Barbara Wyllie, Reaktion Books, 2010. This book investigates the author’s poetry and prose in both Russian and English, and examines the relationship between Nabokov’s extraordinary erudition and the themes that recur across the span of his works

© Roy Johnson 2015


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Filed Under: Vladimir Nabokov Tagged With: English literature, Kiterary criticism, Literary studies, Vladimir Nabokov

Vladimir Nabokov greatest works

September 27, 2009 by Roy Johnson

Vladimir Nabokov is one of the great twentieth-century writers. He wrote of himself: “I was born in Russia and went to university in England, then lived in Germany for twenty years before emigrating to the United States.” The first half of his oeuvre was written in Russian; then he switched briefly to French, and then permanently to English. He also spent a third period of exile living in Geneva, and translating his earlier works from Russian into English.

Nabokov loves word-play, stories that pose riddles, and games which keep readers guessing. Above all, he loves jokes. He produces witty and intellectual writing – and yet persistently draws our attention to moments of tenderness and neglected sadness in life. It is lyric, poetic writing, in the best sense of these terms.

Beginners should start with some of the short stories or the early novels, before tackling the challenges of his later work. Be prepared for black humour and unashamed tenderness – often on the same page. And be sure to keep a dictionary on hand.

 

Vladimir Nabokov greatest works -LolitaLolita (1955) is without doubt Nabokov’s masterpiece – a tour de force of fun and games in both character, plot, and linguistic artistry. And yet its overt subject is something now considered quite dangerous – paedophilia. A sophisticated European college professor goes on a sexual joy ride around the USA with his teenage step-daughter. He evades the law, but drives deeper and deeper into a moral Sargasso, and the end is a tragedy for all concerned. There are wonderful evocations of middle America, terrific sub-plots, and language games with deeply embedded clues on every page. You will probably need to read it more than once to work out what is going on, and each reading will reveal further depths.  

Lolita – a tutorial and study guide
Lolita – buy the book at Amazon UK
Lolita – buy the book at Amazon US

 

Vladimir Nabokov greatest works - Pale FirePale Fire is a very clever artistic joke. It’s a book in two parts – the first a long poem (quite readable) written by an American poet who we are encouraged to think of as someone like Robert Frost. The second half is a series of footnoted commentaries on the text written by his neighbour, friend, and editor. But as we read on the explanation begins to take over the poem itself, we begin to doubt the reliability – and ultimately the sanity – of the editor, and we end up suspended in a nether-world, half way between life and illusion. It’s a brilliantly funny parody of the scholarly ‘method’ – written around the same time that Nabokov was himself writing an extensive commentary to his translation of Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin.

Pale Fire – a tutorial and study guide
Pale Fire – buy the book at Amazon UK
Pale Fire – buy the book at Amazon US

 

PninPnin is one of his most popular short novels. It deals with the culture clash and catalogue of misunderstandings which occur when a Russian professor of literature arrives on an American university campus. Like many of Nabokov’s novels, the subject matter mirrors his life – but without ever descending into cheap autobiography. This is a witty and tender account of one form of naivete trying to come to terms with another. This particular novel has always been very popular with the general reading public – probably because it does not contain any of the dark and often gruesome humour that pervades much of Nabokov’s other work.  

Pnin – a tutorial and study guide
Pnin – buy the book at Amazon UK
Pnin – buy the book at Amazon US

 

Vladimir Nabokov greatest works - Collected StoriesCollected Stories Nabokov is also a master of the short story form, and like many writers he tried some of his literary experiments there first, before giving them wider reign in his novels. This collection of sixty-five complete stories is drawn from his entire working life. They range from the early meditations on love, loss, and memory, through to the later technical experiments, with unreliable story-tellers and the games of literary hide-and-seek. All of them are characterised by a stunning command of language, rich imagery, and a powerful lyrical inventiveness.  

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Vladimir Nabokov greatest works - Speak MemorySpeak Memory is supposed to be an autobiography, but if you are looking for frank confessions and concrete details, you will be disappointed. Nabokov was almost pathologically private, and he argued consistently that readers should not look into writer’s private lives. This ‘memoir’ covers Nabokov’s first forty years, up to his departure from Europe for America at the outset of World War II. The ostensible subject-matter is his emergence as a writer, his early loves and his marriage, his passion for butterflies and his lost homeland. But what he really offers is a series of meditations on human experience, the passage of time, and how the magic of art is able to transcend and encapsulate both.  

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Vladimir Nabokov greatest works - DespairDespair – is an early ‘Berlin’ novel which deals with the literary figure of ‘the double’. Chocolate manufacturer Herman Herman (see the point?) is being cuckolded by his vulgar brother-in-law and his sluttish wife. He meets a man who he believes to be his exact double, and plans a fake suicide to escape his torments. Everything goes horribly wrong, in a way which is simultaneously grotesque, amusing, and rather sad. All of this is typical of the way in which Nabokov manages to blend black humour with a lyrical prose style.

Despair – a tutorial and study guide
Despair – buy the book at Amazon UK
Despair – buy the book at Amazon US

 

Vladimir Nabokov greatest works - MaryMary (1923) is his first novel, in which he evokes the raptures of youthful pleasures, and the discovery of passion and loss. His lyrical prose records a young Russian exile’s recollections of his first love affair. But the woman in question clearly symbolises his relationship with Russia. Nabokov is also good at a creating a marvellous sense of awe in contemplating the quiet aesthetic pleasures in everyday events and special moments of being.  

Mary – a tutorial and study guide
Mary – buy the book at Amazon UK
Mary – buy the book at Amazon US

 

Vladimir Nabokov greatest works - Laughter in the DarkLaughter in the Dark and King, Queen, Knave show a much darker side to his nature, with its focus on adultery and deception. These traits are taken to an uncomfortable extreme in Laughter in the Dark (1932) which plots the downfall of a man who runs off with a young girl who, when he is rendered blind in a car accident, secretly moves her lover in to live under the same roof. The pair of them torment the protagonist in a particularly gruesome fashion – a theme Nabokov was to explore twenty years later in Lolita.

Laughter in the Dark – a tutorial and study guide
Laughter in the Dark – buy the book at Amazon UK
Laughter in the Dark – buy the book at Amazon US

 

Vladimir Nabokov greatest works - The GiftThe Gift (1936) is generally held to be the greatest of his Russian novels. It deals with the ironies and agonies of exile. It is the last of the novels Nabokov wrote in his native Russian and the crowning achievement of that period in his literary career. It’s also his ode to Russian literature, evoking the works of Pushkin, Gogol, and others in the course of its narrative: the story of Fyodor Godunov-Cherdyntsev, an impoverished émigré poet living in Berlin, who dreams of the book he will someday write – a book very much like The Gift itself. The novel also includes a deeply felt fictionalisation of the murder of Nabokov’s own father in 1922 whilst he was attempting to stop a political assassination.

Buy the book at Amazon UK
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© Roy Johnson 2009


More on Vladimir Nabokov
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Filed Under: Vladimir Nabokov Tagged With: Despair, King, Knave, Laughter in the Dark, Literary studies, Lolita, Mary, Pale Fire, Pnin, Queen, Speak Memory, The Gift, The novel, The Short Story, Vladimir Nabokov

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